First, I acknowledge your grief, compounded by the tragic – and currently inexplicable – circumstances of the young man’s death. But seriously, the compounding pretty much ends there.

Re the body-bungle. Fact: the middle-east (and not just Iraq) in 2006 is a giant charnel-house, and in these circumstances, a cadaver mix-up is as equally (no more, no less) regrettable as the above hypothetical, ill-timed fart.

That is, it was and remains purely your choice whether to laugh or cry at it all. Saying that “nothing’s going to bring your boy/man back” is trite; but looking at video and text of the actual set-up at the Kuwait morgue should focus your thinking here. The morgue is a chaotic wholesale operation, dominated by the bodies of third-world workers who came to the middle-east in search of a life that they plainly got short-changed on.

So if the Kovco family gets any compo out of this, and they have any decency, then I suggest remitting a fair chunk of it to ensuring that dead third-world workers’ bodies in Kuwait get a little bit more respect, henceforth. Which would also benefit any future Australian corpses that might (touch wood) pass through that awful place. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Re the lost-report bungle. In terms of what Defence's Elizabeth Cosson did, the only “bungle” was a momentary, easy-to-make lapse. If blame should be pinged anywhere within Defence, then it should ultimately rest with whoever was so cheap as to not allow Elizabeth Cosson her own laptop.

Much more blame, however, should be thrown at the git who found what was plainly sensitive, confidential information – and then decided not to hand it in to [insert responsible agency]. What a creep, and what a fucktard Derryn Hinch was for exploiting the Kovco family in this way, for ratings and/or his skewed sense of the fourth estate’s role.